In Gratitude
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
"Transcendently disobedient, the most existence-affirming and iconoclastic defense a writer could mount against her own extinction." --Heidi Julavits, New York Times Book Review
From "one of the great anomalies of contemporary literature" (The New York Times Magazine) comes a breathtaking memoir about terminal cancer and the author's relationship with Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing.
In July 2014, Jenny Diski was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer and given "two or three years" to live. She didn't know how to react. All responses felt scripted, as if she were acting out her part. To find the response that felt wholly her own, she had to face the clichés and try to write about it. And there was another story to write, one she had not yet told: that of being taken in at age fifteen by the author Doris Lessing, and the subsequent fifty years of their complex relationship.
In the pages of the London Review of Books, to which Diski contributed for the last quarter century, she unraveled her history with Lessing: the fairy-tale rescue as a teenager, the difficulties of being absorbed into an unfamiliar family, the modeling of a literary life. Swooping from one memory to the next--alighting on the hysterical battlefield of her parental home, her expulsion from school, the drug-taking twenty-something in and out of psychiatric hospitals--and telling all through the lens of living with terminal cancer, through what she knows will be her final months, Diski paints a portrait of two extraordinary writers--Lessing and herself.
From a wholly original thinker comes a book like no other: a cerebral, witty, dazzlingly candid masterpiece about an uneasy relationship; about memory and writing, ingratitude and anger; about living with illness and facing death.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This revealingly raw memoir by British author Diski (What I Don't Know About Animals) about living with terminal cancer is even more poignant in light of her death on April 28, 2016, shortly before the book's U.S. publication. She spends time indulging in (entirely justifiable) self-pity, but in a manner that is witty and enlightening. From the beginning, Diski draws readers in, describing her emotions upon receiving a cancer diagnosis as "embarrassment" tinged with exhaustion. She then interweaves her experiences dealing with cancer and the subsequent chemotherapy with her memories, highlighting her teenage years living with writer Doris Lessing and the tenuous bond they forged over the next 50 years. Diski dredges up her difficult childhood with bizarre parents an abusive, perfectionist mother and unscrupulous father which led to time spent as the youngest patient in a psychiatric unit. Painting a vivid picture of the extreme exhaustion caused by chemo, she relates finding refuge in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, which "have always offered me the common sense of my situation." She concludes the book with a series of floating ruminations on life and death. Both heavy and light, Diski's beautifully written memoir is worth any reader's time.
